This paper presents ChatCounselor, a large language model (LLM) solution
designed to provide mental health support. Unlike generic chatbots,
ChatCounselor is distinguished by its foundation in real conversations between
consulting clients and professional psychologists, enabling it to possess
specialized knowledge and counseling skills in the field of psychology. The
training dataset, Psych8k, was constructed from 260 in-depth interviews, each
spanning an hour. To assess the quality of counseling responses, the counseling
Bench was devised. Leveraging GPT-4 and meticulously crafted prompts based on
seven metrics of psychological counseling assessment, the model underwent
evaluation using a set of real-world counseling questions. Impressively,
ChatCounselor surpasses existing open-source models in the counseling Bench and
approaches the performance level of ChatGPT, showcasing the remarkable
enhancement in model capability attained through high-quality domain-specific
data.

ChatCounselor 是一种基于真实心理咨询对话构建的大型语言模型解决方案，它拥有专业心理学知识和咨询技巧，在咨询工作中具备专门化的能力；使用心理咨询评估的七个指标作为依据，通过 GPT-4 和精心设计的提示进行训练，ChatCounselor 在实际咨询问题上的表现超越了开源模型，接近于 ChatGPT，展示了通过高质量领域特定数据获得的模型能力的显著增强。